Contents

Both platforms offer a very minimal operating system layer and they take different approaches to automating the deployment of containers across multiple hosts. They have quite a few similarities, like the dependence on systemd and journald. They also employ some interesting upgrade and package management mechanisms that make the host OS relatively expendable

Individuals and businesses migrate to Linux for a variety of reasons. Disgust with Microsoft or Apple regimentation and software limitations are but two of them.

For some, the greater flexibility that comes from open source software, as well as better cost and productivity controls, are the driving factors for a move to the Linux OS. The benefits vary depending on the use case and the desktop or server configurations employed.

In today’s Linux news, www.makeuseof.com briefs users on the top 10 Linux desktops. Jack Germain discusses some of the challenges of migrating to Linux. Katherine Noyes takes another look at the Linux job market. Fedora 21 needs supplementary wallpapers and Sam Varghese introduces a new generation to the Debian Administrator’s Handbook. That and more in today’s Linux community news.

HP will ship PCs running the Chinese-language version of Ubuntu, the first manufacturer to do so, in what may be a move to capitalise on millions of Chinese people looking for a successor to Windows XP.

Despite Microsoft ending support for the Windows XP operating system in April this year, about 40 percent of computer users in China still run the OS, according to figures from StatCounter, which tracks the OS used by visitors to websites worldwide.

Desktop

The new Chromebook has the latter design, much to the surprise of Youtuber Lachlan, who discovered the alternate Chromebook 11 and posted a video of it. Apparently, Lachlan, who resides in Australia, purchased what was labelled as a “white Chromebook 11″, but soon realized that it was not the same as the other Chromebooks 11, but rather a miniature Chromebook 14.

The world’s leading PC maker Lenovo has also joined the Linux band-wagon and launched its first Linux-powered Chromebook for consumers space – earlier Lenovo offered Chromebooks for education. Lenovo has announced two Chromebooks – N20 and N20p. While both Chromebooks are identical, N20p offers a touchscreen display and its keyboard can flex 300° backward to convert from Laptop mode to Stand mode. So users can use the 10-finger touchscreen to consume content. It’s definitely a great device for both content consumption as well as content creation.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Patching a Linux kernel without any downtime is likely to become a common practice over the next few years; two patches released earlier this year are likely to make what is a task requiring downtime something that can be done on the fly.

The amount of changes and fixes for this branch of the Linux kernel is large, considering the build number. This is, after all, an LTS release and it has been around for quite some time. There is no sign that the maintenance for 3.10.x is stopping anytime soon, so you should make the best of it.

Graphics Stack

The hardware for today’s comparison was limited by running into an above-average number of regressions within the Radeon and Nouveau drivers at this stage in the Linux kernel development cycle. For the AMD hardware the newer “GCN” hardware was problematic and ultimately none of those graphics cards successfully finished our array of OpenGL benchmarks. The current AMD problems are outlined within Newer AMD Radeon GPUs Have Had A Tough Time With Linux 3.15. Open-source AMD developers are currently work to address these issues but at the time of testing they hadn’t yet successfully mainlined any of the necessary fixes.

Between stable builds, the developers launch a large number of Beta versions that integrate a lot of new features. The previous update for this branch was a really small one, but now a more important version has been released, prompting users to upgrade the application.

Most of the time, the Steam client is pretty stable and users don’t usually encounter any problems with it, either about performance or stability. This doesn’t mean that the software is perfect, because there still are instances where some features or options might not work as expected.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

If you have a decent computer and you are interested in dabbling in Linux, KDE is where you might want to start. You see, there are many desktop environments for Linux, but Windows users would probably feel most comfortable in KDE — it resembles what they are used to, with things like a start button and menu.

KDE is pleased to announce that Plasma Next Beta 1 has been released. Plasma Next is the codename for the new version of our beautiful desktop workspace built on KDE Frameworks 5. It features the same familiar layout you will be used to but with a simplified and more slick look from the new KDE Visual Design Group. For the first time our desktop ships with its own font, the Oxygen Font.

digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0. This version, include many new features introduced by completed GSoC 2013 projects:

A new tool dedicated to organize whole tag hierarchies. This new feature is relevant of GoSC-2013 project from Veaceslav Munteanu. Veaceslav has also implemented multiple selection and multiple drag-n-drop capabilities on Tags Manager and Tags View from sidebars, and the support for writing face rectangles metadata in Windows Live Photo format.
A new maintenance tool dedicated to parse image quality and auto-tags items automatically using Pick Labels. This tool is relevant to another GoSC-2013 project from Gowtham Ashok.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

The GNOME development is running smoothly and the second update for the 3.12.x branch has been released. Numerous fixes were made in the previous release, but it turns out that the second one is not that big.

Learning how to navigate within the Enlightenment shell is where the learning curve occurs. A second, steeper curve involves figuring out how to massage the seemingly endless options to customize the desktop functionality. If you have lots of time to devote to learning something new within something old, check out Enlightenment — but do it through a distro built around it.

A Wednesday Wall Street Journal article alleged that Red Hat was not supporting RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) customers using a rival version of OpenStack and violating open source principles.

“Red Hat Inc. has outrun dozens of companies over the past decade to become the dominant commercial provider of the open-source operating system known as Linux,” the article reads, adding that some rivals, partners and customers fear that it’s gone too far with OpenStack.

Red Hat made a slew of OpenStack-related announcements at this week’s OpenStack Summit conference in Atlanta, but the company is also drawing buzz following reports in the press that claimed that the company shows favoritism in the support it offers to users of various distributions of OpenStack. Specifically, the reports claimed that Red Hat will refuse to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux if a customer uses a distribution of the cloud hosting software from another company.

When I joined Red Hat as a language maintainer for the Hindi language, I was struggling with the problem of inconsistency and standardization in localization. (Aside from Red Hat, I also coordinate several FOSS localization projects for the Hindi language; a language with a large population of speakers as well as many dialects and regional differences.) During community review meetups of localized projects, I found that we had to frequently go over terms like file, save, open, etc. For the simple word file, the community had been using more than five other words that had equivalent meanings. From this observataion, we decided we should create a system that standardizes the most commonly used terms; this idea gave life to the FUEL project. The name reflects how the program strives to meet the standardization of what we are calling Frequently Used Entries for Localization.

When the CentOS Project joined forces with Red Hat in January, project leaders promised to open up the distribution to more community contributions. Under the new community model, CentOS will continue to rebuild Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But SIGs, which include independent groups of open source projects, will be invited to build and maintain their own CentOS integrations on top of the core code, or to replace it altogether.

Red Hat has made available a beta release for the next version of its OpenStack distribution, which is set to combine the Icehouse version of the OpenStack framework with its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system.

Developers have proposed adding even more features to Fedora 21, which is the next Fedora release shipping before the end of the year. There’s already a lot of features under development and it’s going to be a heavy release with nearly one year since Fedora 20, but even more work is on the way.

FUDCon is an opportunity for all who contribute to or use Fedora to meet, learn, plan, and hack. This FUDCon is being held from Friday 23th May – Sunday 25 May, 2014, and is being held in conjunction with the GNOME.Asia summit.

Debian Family

When Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas wrote and published the Debian Administrator’s Handbook in 2004, it was in French, their native language.

In the decade since, the book has been translated into English – and from English into several other languages – and grown to be what few other GNU/Linux distributions have: a comprehensive manual for those who want to learn all about the distro, written by people at heart of the action.

Above all, anyone who reads the book will quickly realise that it is written by developers who care deeply about what they are doing.

For those that don’t know, Tails offers complete privacy (or close to) by way of Tor, its a Debian based distro provided as a bootable image and the idea is you place it on a USB or DVD so that when you turn off the machine, no data is stored locally. Whilst the distro is aimed at the “mainstream average user” I cannot see any other user having issues configuring or indeed using any other distro (with the correctly installed tools) to do exactly the same thing.

You’ve got OpenOffice, GIMP, Audacity included for your other needs and they don’t need any further explanation.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Ricardo Salveti de Araujo of Canonical shared that over the weekend every needed package was approved and as a result they have published their first working image of the x86 Ubuntu Phone/Touch emulator.

It’s hard to shock an audience at a technical conference. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its parent company Canonical, managed it several times in his OpenStack Summit keynote speech. No news may have been more surprising than that Canonical had ported its Juju DevOps program to its rival’s operating systems: Red Hat’s CentOS and Microsoft’s Hyber-V and Windows Server 2012.

Today I’ve updated the Atom Ubuntu PPA with the latest Atom code from GitHub and, while the application still doesn’t work on 32bit, there is some good news: Atom uses dynamic libraries now, so you might be able to use my builds in Linux distributions other than Ubuntu (Fedora, Debian etc.). The new version also comes with quite a few Linux bug fixes.

The desktop team would like to add a new flavour (ish, we don’t plan to
have any formal releases at this point) of Ubuntu which contains the
Unity 8 desktop and the new applications which have been developed for
the touch project.

Canonical is pushing hard to expand Ubuntu into new consumer markets. In the past year we’ve seen shiny prototypes of Ubuntu-based mobile phones and tablets, and the company hasn’t given up on its 2012 vision of getting Ubuntu onto TVs either. What’s more, serious work is underway on converging all of these roles into a single chameleonic OS, something even Microsoft hasn’t attempted. Read on for our full Ubuntu 14.04 review.

On behalf of the desktop team, developer Iain Lane proposed a Desktop version of the Unity 8 in the developer mailing list. While there is no plan for a formal release for this flavour, it will serve as an experimental playground for desktop developers and one more step towards convergence.

If you fancy putting the new Ubuntu Touch tablet and smartphone operating system through its paces, but don’t have a compatible device or are able to load the unofficially supported version on to your Nexus 5 smartphone.

This means that Linux Mint 17, 17.1, 17.2 and 17.3 (so Linux Mint 18 will be based on Ubuntu 16.04) will all use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a base instead of being based on newer Ubuntu releases, allowing the Mint team to “push innovation on Cinnamon, be more active in the development of MATE, better support Mint tools and engage in projects we’ve postponed for years”.

The final version of Linux Mint 17 is due by the end of the month. But you can download the release candidate right now. Linux Mint 17 comes in 32-bit or 64-bit versions, in the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments.

Linux Mint is an open source operating system based on Ubuntu, but with an emphasis on ease of use, simple installation of proprietary media codecs, and a choice of desktop environments that look a bit more like classic Windows than the Unity UI used in recent versions of Ubuntu.

Providing the tool chains to exploit these processors in applications is the DS-5 Development Studio. This has recently been upgraded with a new version of the ARM Compiler tool chain – ARM Compiler 6. This tool chain is a complete break from previous versions, building on the open-source LLVM modular compiler infrastructure including the Clang C/C++ compiler front end. ARM has always devoted effort to supporting Clang, and also LLVM, as well as Eclipse, GNU, and other open-source activities. While the shipped versions of the ARM Compiler 6 will be closed-source binary, ARM anticipates that it will continue to devote considerable resources to the open-source effort alongside other collaborators. Somewhere, someone has said that the advantage of using a commercial release of an open-source product is that you get all the advantages of the input of the contributing community, but when you hit a snag you can pick up the phone and talk to the supplier, rather than having to hunt through a forum to see if anyone else has solved the same problem.

Android

The tablet runs on a customized version of Android 4.4.2 KitKat, called “MIUI.” The user experience on the Mi Pad is somewhat similar to that of Apple’s latest mobile software, iOS 7, according to CNET, which got its hands on the device.

Obsidian Systems, an established home-grown supplier of open source software solutions, has proudly implemented an ‘out-of-the-bottle’ series of information and networking sessions for those who are thirsty for insight into the latest developments in open source technology. Simply titled ‘Free Beer Sessions’, the initiative brings together open source enthusiasts and users at a forum to discuss and deliberate advances in this market space.

Tufts, which is located just north of Boston, took the top prize, with Utah State in second place, followed by Notre Dame in third. Unsurprisingly, many of the schools most associated with the tech industry were highly ranked, with UC – Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, and Stanford all within the top 15. The study also broke down the results by state, with Utah on top, followed by Massachusetts and Indiana.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

The autonomous region of Galicia will this year migrate at least one-thousand government workstations to exclusively use the LibreOffice open source suite of office solutions, it announced on 30 April. The government also said it would start raising awareness among the region’s public administrations about the advantages of sharing, and promoting the reuse of ICT solutions. The government has reserved a 147,000 euro budget for this year’s free software actions.

Business

Public Services/Government

Do you have an idea that has the potential to transform how citizens interact with their government on a local, state, or even national level? Turning that potential into reality is a process that faces many challenges. But first things first: Where will you get your funding?

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Open Government Week is always a time for reflection on what has changed in the previous 12 months, and this year is no exception. Open Raleigh is nearing it’s second year as a program.

Open Raleigh shares this milestone with the Open Data Institute (ODI) which is also nearing a second birthday. The Open Data Institute has had significant influence over the development of the Open Raleigh program and over open data as a movement. The ODI was one of the first institutions to suggest an open data strategy and philosophy that stresses inclusiveness and collaboration.

Another day, another story of someone with skin way too thin not comprehending satire and dashing off an angry legal threat. In this case, it’s worse than usual because the bogus legal threat is coming from the US government. Popehat has the full story of how some of the legal geniuses at the Department of Health and Human Services have sent a bogus cease-and-desist letter over a pair of obviously satirical posts on the site AddictionMyth.com. While we’ve long been skeptical of the medical profession’s desire to label all sorts of things “addictions,” that particular site takes it to extreme levels, arguing that there’s nothing that’s addictive, and all talk of addictions (including drug and alcohol addictions) are just a big scam “perpetrated by law enforcement, rehab groups and the entertainment industry.” I think that’s nuts, but they certainly have their right to say so.

Privacy

A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide details how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they’re delivered. These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.”

The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department (S3261) includes photos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task.

Encrypted Internet traffic is surging worldwide according to data published by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine. After the Snowden revelations the bandwidth consumed by encrypted traffic doubled in North America, and in Europe and Latin America the share of encrypted traffic quadrupled.

Last week I gave a presentation at CommonsFest in the spirit of my Free Your Android post, trying to educate people on simple steps they can make to have better privacy on their mobile devices.

A couple of days before my presentation I watched this great speech from Jillian York and Jacob Appelbaum (please go and watch this). At some point Jacob mentions that “our security is interdependent”.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald just dropped a pile of new secret National Security Agency documents onto the Internet. But this isn’t just some haphazard WikiLeaks-style dump. These documents, leaked to Greenwald last year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, are key supplemental reading material for his new book, No Place to Hide, which went on sale Tuesday.

Internet/Net Neutrality

On Thursday, May 15, hundreds will rally outside the Federal Communications Commission’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to protest Chairman Wheeler’s proposal that has the potential to stop the flow of a free and open Internet. On this same day, thousands of activists, organizations and companies will take action online to save the Internet.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

It has a .gov address and many of the people I talk to would advise against challenging government agencies/bodies (I believe because of an unwarranted fear of repercussions), suffice to say it doesn’t bother me at all and taking a closer look at the connections between industry and government is always worth doing, if it wasn’t then past “naughty” behaviour by others would never have been discovered.

Is it a I scratch your back world? Who knows? But what is known is that there’s a growing trade (for want of a better word) in groups that live off “defending” others IP. Its worth noting that many of these groups don’t actually create anything at all and are funded to serve the interests of the businesses who pay them. Pay them I hasten to add in many cases on the back of huge profits.

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Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations